Anri Sala

Untitled (Maps/Species) by the artist Anri Sala is a series of works created between 2018 and 2022. It comprises 24 drawings consisting of two sheets each: The first sheet in a diptych shows a historical colored engraving taken from 18th-century natural historical publications. It is complemented by a second sheet that contains a drawing by the artist. The formal design of Sala’s drawings takes its cue from the geographical outlines of countries such as England or the United Arab Emirates or of bodies of water such as the Nile or the Red Sea.

Through the combination of maps and living creatures, Sala points to the artificial, malleable, and random nature of the concepts of nature and nation. In the historical engravings, different species of exotic creatures such as fish or snakes are frequently arranged in such a way that they completely fill the defined frame of a book page. Sala applies the same principle of forming and deforming to his images: his drawing of England, for example, shows a country whose bent shape on the page resembles that of the creatures depicted in the Histoire Naturelle. According to the artist himself, this gesture of distortion aims to break open the often straight and randomly defined national and state borders from colonial times, which can be found in great numbers on, for example, the African and North American continents.

The work Untitled (La Lamproie, Le Serpent marin, La Trompette de mer / England) (2023) is part of the Schering Stiftung Collection at the Kupferstichkabinett Berlin.